Kilimanjaro not a victim of climate change

Seattle Times reports:

The shrinking snowcap atop Mount Kilimanjaro has become an icon of global warming.

Pictures of the African peak, which has lost 90 percent of its ice cover, were featured in Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Greenpeace activists once held a satellite news conference on the summit to sway participants in an international climate conference.

But most scientists who study Kilimanjaro's glaciers have long been uneasy with the volcano's poster-child status. ...

Rising nearly four miles from the plains of eastern Tanzania, Kilimanjaro has seen its glaciers decline steadily for well over a century — since long before humans began pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Mote points out. ...

Also, recent data from Kilimanjaro show temperatures on the 19,340-foot volcano never rise above freezing. So melting triggered by a warmer atmosphere can't be the reason the small summit ice sheet is retreating about 3 feet a year, said Georg Kaser, co-author of the new article and a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. ...

Models predict global warming will increase rainfall in Eastern Africa, which could actually be the thing that saves the "shining mountain's" snowy crown.

So those pictures of Kilimanjaro are really evidence that we don't have enough global warming yet.